Ivy Inwoner > Ivy's Quotes

“See you either in hell or in communism”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.”
― Leon trotsky

“The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different perspective, her clothes magically disappeared to reveal the girl's naked body. When we are bombarded by the heartwarming news of a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic, just move the postcard a little to catch a glimpse of the obscene figure of the liberal communist at work beneath.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!”
― Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

“On 11 September 2001 the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. That date heralded the “happy 90’s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history” –the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won; that the search was over; that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurked just around the corner; that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance were the leaders did not yet grasp that their time was up). In contrast, 9/11 is the main symbol of the Clintonite happy 90’s. This is the era in which new walls emerge everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The rise of the populist New Right is just the most prominent example of the urge to raise new walls.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.”
― Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis

“Is my socialism a religious faith? That’s a longstanding critique, most famously expressed in The God That Failed, a book written by disillusioned former Communist Party supporters after World War II. I’m not sure why socialism was the only god singled out by the authors for failure. What grade did the regular God get in the wake of the Nazis and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a C+?”
― Danny Katch, Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.”
― Cory Doctorow, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century

“Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?”
― Cory Doctorow

“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
― Cory Doctorow

“For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.”
― Cory Doctorow

“Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.”
― Cory Doctorow, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

“I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anything. We’re watching the system destroy itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Demanding the Impossible

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche